Language of air

Search This Blog

Posts

Rapture of
Psyche by Zephyrus. Allegory of the abduction of the psyche (mind, soul) by the
wind. Zephyrus was one of the four divinities of air,
namely that corresponds to west wind, of the Greek mythology. Son of Astreo
and Eos, it was considered the mildest and most benign of the winds. According
to the myth, he served Eros by abducting Psyché and taking her to his cave. The
wind literally abducts the psyche and leaves it in the hands of love and desire
(Eros). The 'psyché',
according to the etymology of the word, is already in itself the 'breath of air'.
It is the breath that gives us life, mainly gives us the soul and the
understanding.

Thus our soul
and our mind, ethereal by themselves, are completely at the mercy of the air

Memory is not a 'copy' of reality. The
past is not in our memory. It is there as little as the future is. The mind is
present activity. Contents that mind produces, about what has already happened
or what might happen, are the result of its activity, they are not the mind. Brands
of memory remain with some of our experiences, but the fact we want to see in
these brands the reality itself or a reproduction of it is due to the bias of
our anthropocentric and psychologizing vision, by which we replace the world by
the contents of thought. Our mind does not work like a computer,
says R. Epstein. Our brain actually is not an information store. Our brain,
strictly speaking, does not process information nor recovers knowledge nor
saves memories. The computer is just a metaphor. What the brain does, more or
less, is to resonate with reality; it is like a soundboard that, as everything,
operates in the present, not in the past or in the future. It works in the
physical present, with ele…

The
more certain existence and the better we know is indisputably ours,
because, of all other objects, we possess external and superficial
triable notions, while we perceive ourselves internally, deeply. What
do we check then? What is, in this exceptional case, the meaning of
the verb 'to exist'? First
I see that I passage from one state to another state. I'm cold or
heat, I'm happy or sad, I work or do nothing, I look around me or
think about something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions,
representations, such are the modifications among which distributes
my existence and which color it alternately. I change, then, without
ceasing. (p.13) Thus
the anthology of Henri Bergson (1957), conducted by Gilles Deleuze,
starts, with this text of L'évolution creatrice, direct and
full of content. And follows: (...)
I say, and rightly so, that I change, but the change seems to reside
in the passage from one state to the next state: for each state,
considered separately, I bel…

In life, unless you want to be miserable, you must
find your way, the real reason of your existence, and not depend as a puppet
of what others think, say or do. You have to have clear ideas of what you want
and get away from the distractions and do not act because of hypocrisy or
selfishness, believing to adapt to 'souls' of others, which in reality you do
not know (probably you do not even know yours). This is the direction in which
you should work, Marcus Aurelius keeps in his Meditations.It's your soul which you
must find and you should go; you must respect primarily the soul that belongs to
you and not depend on the souls of others, although you also have to want to
understand them, but you need to know the movements of yours first, and from these
those of others. The main goal of our life is to know the real nature of our
soul, and its place in the souls of other people around us. "At all
hours, deal with resolve, to do what you have in your hands with timely and
…

Giordano Bruno argues in the book ‘De la Magia’ that the absolute vacuum
does not exist, there is no space not occupied by any form of matter: In any
space, empty as it may seem, there are bodies moving and passing but the
invisible air particles, which are also matter. The objects of the world are not isolated from each
other, among them there is a continuum of matter, he states; imperceptible
space among perceptible bodies is a continuum, rather than separate, mediates
between them, communicates and keeps them united. The air (or 'aerial or
ethereal spirit' as Bruno calls) is an imperceptible body, in principle, to our
senses but by itself is a true physical intermediary continuous among all
bodies, which is endowed with great activity and effectiveness upon the soul,
that is closely united to it, he says, and has a strong resemblance to it, at a
time that is very different from substance of thicker perceptible objects that it
links. "The vacuum, i.e. a space without bodi…

Throughout history, in
different times and in different areas of thought, mind was very
differently conceived than we do today. Here is shown an
unconventional design to modern science, which is the idea of soul as
something material, in one hand, yet not totally contained within the
physical limits of the body or located in any specific part of the
body, in the other. This idea, that can be
shocking, is that of an 'extensive' soul, a material element that
acts on the body. This soul would be 'made' of a non-solid, much more
subtle than the body, almost imperceptible, like air or breath, but
also physical. Initially it is difficult to
understand a conception like this, in which the most human, what
defines us as persons, ceases to be located within 'us' in the
misunderstanding that 'we' are simply 'our body'. In our
interpretation the soul as an exclusive product of nervous system
function disappeares, it does not 'emerge' spectacularly fr…

Bergson
said "the spirit embraces the past, while the body is confined in a present that constantly begins again and again". Indeed,
our mind handles content that come from the past but it works
organically in the pure present, which is constantly renewed
independently of those memories. All true operation, mental or of any
kind, necessarily occurs in the present... We
do not perceive the present in a pure way, we can only to intuit; it
is a hidden variable to our direct knowledge and we just can make
suppositions, because all perception is contaminated by traces of the
past, by the knowledge we have been setting over time. Memories shape
our perception of objects and events that occur now. However
everything real occurs now, in 'a present that continually starts
again and again' and in which we are confined. It seems a terrible paradox. The
present is the duration of the phenomena, the duration of the actions
of our body and our perceptual and cognitive systems. The p…